Originally posted on the now-defunct Build Freedom site, this noteworthy piece by one Mack Tanner fell beyond the reach of even the Wayback Machine. Fortunately, I had a printout lying around from way back when, and with a scan here, a conversion there, a bit of help from an online OCR reader after that, and a few paragraphs of typing to cover whatever ground all that failed to, it now has a new home, here at MRDA’s Inferno; happy reading, reprobates!

Must We Have Myths To Be Happy?

By Mack Tanner

Can human beings live happy, contented lives only if they are sustained by religious beliefs? Is reality so depressing that the human intellect can’t function unless it hides itself in mythical structures of paranormal gods, magical controls over nature, or imagined beliefs about human nature? Do myths play an important, perhaps a critical role in achieving a happy, contented personal life? Because myths are such an important part of all historical cultures, must we conclude they may be necessary for successful human survival?

I use the term myth to describe any belief that effects human existence, behavior, or history that can not be demonstrated by empirical evidence. A myth is not necessarily a false belief, it’s a belief that can’t be falsified using the scientific method.

While we generally think in terms of the paranormal when we talk about myths, myths don’t have to be based on the paranormal beliefs to be considered myths. The belief in the superiority of the white race, the inevitable success of communism, or faith in the goodness of democratic government are myths just as much as is a belief in the psychic power of crystals.

Every single human culture is designed around a complicated network of myths that have developed over the eons through an evolutionary process in which the myths often seem to take on a life of their own, much like genes. Cultural myths control human personal behavior in a myriad different ways ranging from toilet and feeding habits to civic duties. It would be an extraordinarily rare event for any child to grow up without collecting a set of mythical beliefs which he or she will accept throughout his or her lifetime as eternal truths.

Even those who renounce paranormal beliefs in gods, souls, and eternal life, often still continue to believe in a collection of cultural and secular myths. They regularly use such non-paranormal myths as basic assumptions in determining what kind of behavior is most likely to produce a happy, well adjusted person and society.

These secular myths include such concepts as natural rights, social justice, equality, altruism, the common good, democratic government, the brotherhood of human kind, and the moral requirement that humans respect the rights, property, and lives of others.

Such secular myths don’t just serve a feel-good purpose but they can have a profound impact on the life of the believer. For example, a young man or woman may decide to go into teaching or join the Peace Corps, a mythical good, rather than accept a lucrative job in business, a selfish, and therefore mythically bad, choice. These secular myths play an important role in a person’s definition of him or herself and his or her position in society.

What we call moral imperatives must either be rules imposed on humanity by some supernatural being or they are nothing but human artifacts. No empirical evidence can be found in nature that provides a justification for why any individual must follow any moral rule. God doesn’t punish the murderer, the thief, the rapist, nor the liar in this life, and neither does nature. We can easily demonstrate that all animals must feed, defecate, maintain certain body temperatures, and escape predators or suffer serious personal consequences. We can not demonstrate that any individual animal, even a human animal, will suffer inevitable serious consequences if it kills and eats its siblings, or steals food from other members of its species.

If our fundamental secular beliefs and values cannot be justified on a rational, scientific bases, then they are mythical beliefs, and all value systems and ideologies which are based on such values and beliefs must be considered mythical systems.

Does the recognition that our fundamental beliefs can not be empirically justified mark the end of reason, or is this where the journey into a world of rational thought must really begin? Does the person who examines and questions the validity of the very basis of his or her moral personality risk stepping off into a chasm of hopeless despair and nihilism, or does that thought process offer a possibility of greater understanding of oneself and one’s relation with humanity as well as the opportunity to achieve true intellectual freedom and maximum mental health?

The plain fact is that the scientific examination of human existence strips away every claim for a special status of humanity that would put us above the rest of nature. We discover that we are just one more animal and every human attribute is nothing but the sum total of a chaotic, purposeless evolution. There is no scientific proof of god, no evidence of special meaning for human existence, no set of eternal moral and ethical values, nothing in nature that can be described as good nor as evil.

Most humans find this a frightening conclusion, so frightening it’s been given a dirty name, nihilism. Having made the inevitable result of a scientific, rational examination of the human condition an obscenity, the conclusion is dismissed as something too dangerous to even consider, and even the philosophers retreat back into the last level of myths. If they are honest enough to admit they are doing so, they justify the retreat with claims that civilization couldn’t survive without belief systems where words like justice, rights, fairness, ethics, morals, good and evil are concepts that require no scientific justification.

With the exception of a few tough-minded philosophers, philosophy since the enlightenment, and especially since Darwin, has cut itself loose from any serious claim to adherence to scientific empiricism, especially when attempting to address the issues of moral behavior. Some philosophers who do dare to recognized the inevitable nihilistic truths of existence, still choose to avoid examining such truths by claiming that the human mind is incapable of dealing with them.

One such author, John F. Schumaker, in his book Wings of Illusion, proposes that paranormal myths are an evolutionary solution the allows human beings to cope–with life by avoiding the dismal reality of our own inevitable death and the lack of a transcendental meaning in our lives. Schumaker argues that reality is so distressing that the human propensity for paranormal beliefs is a form of evolved insanity that allows humans to ignore the dismal truths while getting on with the business of living and propagating.

Adopting an intellectual elitism, Schumaker admits the truth of the nihilistic conclusions and seems to have no trouble with his own sanity as a result, but then suggests that the vast majority of humanity is incapable of surviving the same shock of understanding.

Schumaker doesn’t just argue that humans must have myths to survive, he argues that the myths which best serve humanity are paranormal myths. He offers statistical evidence suggesting that people with strong paranormal religious beliefs experience better mental health than those who have no paranormal beliefs. He concludes that most humans can not live mentally healthy lives without their paranormal myths and that although we have reached a stage of technical development in which myths may threaten the very survival of the species, there is little hope that humankind will give up their myths.

Schumaker’s conclusions can be challenged on both his basic assumption and at the strength of his empirical research. His basic assumption that the human mind evolved its myth making ability as a defense against the horrors of rationality is pure conjecture. Schumaker ascribes to evolution a purposefulness that doesn’t exist in nature. Evolution is a chaotic process with no purpose nor plan, nor is there an inevitable specific result for any species. While survival of the fittest is the primary control, it is by no means certain that every attribute of a species was necessary nor critical for survival. For example the ability to create and appreciate art, literature, and music may be nothing but a pleasure freebie we collected as a part of the evolutionary development of a conscious, rational mind.

A simpler explanation than the reality-is-too-horrible-to-contemplate theory might be that myths result from an instinctual need for the human mind to explain the world around us and to gain control over it. The myth-creating ability would have allowed primitive humans to explain things they couldn’t understand, like why the sun comes up every morning, so that they could concentrate on more practical matters, like when the elk herds migrate through the territory and what time of the year the family should plant the corn.

Another alternative, or complementary, explanation of myth making might be that human societies evolved mythologies as effective tools for organizing and controlling the members of a culture and instructing the children in the working traditions of the culture. The proposal that myths were utilized as a form of societal control—the original boogie man—does as much to explain the universality of myths as Schumaker’s argument that humans had to go insane to survive the reality of existence. This theory suggests that myths and the needs for myths are cultural memes, not gene-based instincts.

Myth explanation theories based on a human need to explain and understand nature, or as tools for cultural control, or as a combination of the two needs, would also suggests that it might be much easier for humans to break out of the straight jacket of myth-believing than it would be if myth-believing is instinctual insanity.

Schumaker used a very small number of self-professed atheists in his comparison of the mental health of atheists versus religious believers. The criteria of separation was belief in the paranormal myths, not belief in myths in general. No effort was made to identify as a separate group those who had not just rejected a belief in the paranormal, but who had also rejected popular secular mythologies about human behavior.

If all that Schumaker has done is compare the level of happiness of those who believe in religious myths versus those who believe in non-religious secular myths, he has only established that some kinds of myths have greater utility for mental health than other kinds myths. He hasn’t addressed the possibility of whether or not the person who rejects both paranormal and secular myths is better off for the experience.

Most Christians are probably much happier these days than the atheistic, communist true believer and for good reason, the communist myths have failed on a grand scale. Schumaker himself concludes that the best myths are those that cannot be falsified. He makes that suggestion in comparing the old time religions with modern paganisms and new-age beliefs, but his arguments apply equally well to secular myths. One can’t prove that God doesn’t exist, but it’s easy to empirically demonstrate with recent historical evidence that socialism is not the best, nor the inevitable economic system for a human society.

A good argument can be made that it makes no sense to trade the old time religion for a half-way house of secular myths that make promises for this life that are not delivered. One may be better advised to either stick with the proven mythologies or go all the way to myth-free thinking.

While many secular humanists who reject paranormal beliefs correctly argue that religious beliefs have been directly responsible for much of the human misery and blood shed through history, they are seldom willing to examine and recognize the damage and havoc wrought by the secular mythologies and ideologies that they espouse.

The twentieth century stands out as the single bloodiest century in human history in terms of the massive numbers of people who have been killed, maimed, imprisoned, or starved as a direct result of deliberate human action. With only minor exceptions, all of this Twentieth Century misery resulted from attempts to forge societies that would guarantee a collection of secular ideological goals such as social justice, the common good, and economic equality.

As Jean-Francois Revel points out in his book The Flight from Truth: The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information , secular intellectuals passionately defend their liberal, socialists, and Marxist myths despite the overwhelming evidence of the horrendous practical results of such secular mythologies. Revel outlines in considerable detail the way in which intellectuals selectively scorn and ignore historical evidence, always insisting that the ideologies would work if only a few new wrinkles were tried. Such intellectuals demonstrate a cognitive dissonance in defending their mythically based secular ideologies that follows the same irrational thought process of any true believer in the paranormal religions.

These same tendencies continues in America today. While the experience of more than eighty years of attempts at social engineering through the democratic process provides a solid empirical base of evidence of failure, proponents of such things as public education, government welfare systems, and central economic planning continue to refuse to recognize the repeated failures of such ideologies.

This is not to argue that we may not eventually design a human social system that works better than the chaotic system inherited from our ancestors. But we will achieve that future utopia only if we are willing to describe human behavior on a scientific basis that includes the empirical examination of our most basic beliefs and values to determine if they do indeed reflect real human behavior or if they are myths that should be discarded or ignored.

Must the recognition of the nihilistic reality that we are nothing but one more speck of meaningless dust in the universe lead inevitably to self destruction either as an individual or as a whole species?

The popular image of the nihilist is one in which the individual eventually turns to crime or to despair and suicide.

Yet, we all throw out a few myths along the way. No adult claiming to be mentally healthy believes in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy, no matter how fervent their belief may have been as a six year old child. Skeptics, agnostics, and atheists often have abandoned beliefs they may have once held in a personal god who cares, life after death, faith-healing, astrology, fortune telling, and the evil of sex outside of marriage, even though they may have been raised by parents who were totally committed to such beliefs.

Those of us who had taken the intellectual journey out of a strong religious belief system (I was once a Mormon missionary), know well how painful the process can be, both in terms of the loss of a psychological anchor, and the sad, often angry, reaction of friends, family, and loved ones who are convinced that we have given up something precious and desirable and that we are lesser, perhaps even evil, creatures for having done so.

Yet, it’s a one-way trip. For those of us who abandoned religion through a scientific thought process, there is no way we could ever go back to belief in abandoned myths.

I find my personal life better and happier for the experience of losing my religious faith. Old friends and family still mired in the beliefs of Mormonism may think they live a happier, more contented life than I do, but my experience has been that I live much happier because the old myths no longer prevent me from doing what I want to do to achieve a happy, contented status. The important question is not, what makes other people happy, but what makes me happy.

Is it enough to simply reject the myths about supernatural beings, or must the rational mind examine all the myths that make up “our fundamental beliefs”? More important, perhaps, do we have any choice, once we have started the journey, other than taking the process to wherever it might lead?

Myths are like placebos. They sometimes work, but only until we learn what they really are. More important, placebos can be extremely dangerous when taken in place of medicine that might cure the illness.

Those of us who have taken the intellectual exploration of human existence to its final, nihilistic conclusion find that the claim that the rejection of all myths is so terrible it can’t be tolerated by the human mind is one more myth that can not be demonstrated by empirical evidence.

Strip away all the myths, and the human mind is still driven by instincts and learning to survive and to engage in pleasurable activities. We are all a chaotic combination of instinctual drives, culturally acquired learned instructions, and individual experiences. The human being is a social animal and our best chances for not just survival but personal contentment and happiness are most effectively enhanced by cooperating with others. Even the most rational of human beings must be constantly evaluating how one can best enlist others in cooperative efforts that will achieve the chosen goals of each individual.

We discover through the continuing experiment of daily living that abiding by the so-called common decencies usually does pay of in terms of our own selfish interests. The large majority of the cultural rules can be explained by examining their potential to contribute to individual survival and self-fulfillment. Many of the cultural myths and moral beliefs reflect what is very probably gene-driven instinct. Other moral myths represent a cultural memory of behaviour rules that help grease the cooperative social effort and teach the young the common rules of behaviour. They may be mythical values, but they work in encouraging cooperative behaviour.

The fact that a rational, empirical examination of the human condition leads to the inevitable conclusion that all our beliefs and basic values are based in myth does not require that we abandon all such rules as guidelines for personal behavior. It does allow us the freedom to examine each rule and to determine whether or not any single social or cultural rule actually contributes to our own personal happiness, well being, and immediate survival, and to discard those which don’t.

If we examine the evidence of results, we find that abiding by the common decencies works very well for us as long as we live in a cultural setting in which there is a general consensus that all will comply with the same decencies. The difficulties occur when we must deal with other cultures which observe a different set of common decencies, or when we deal with individuals who have opted in their own selfish interest to ignore the rules, or to use the rules to manipulate us and maximize their advantage at the expense of ours.

In the complex world in which we live, the latter conditions have become the norm rather than the exception. As a result, rational, mythless individuals must be constantly re-examining their personal set of social responses in order to insure that they achieve their own expectations of a cooperative social effort. The person who is able to make decision’s on the basis of the reality of the situation has a considerable advantage over the individual who must also measure his/her actions against some mythical code of behavior that restricts his/her options. The one-eyed man may be king in the kingdom of the blind, but in the kingdom of the morally honest and altruistic, it’s the selfish liar who ends up with all the wealth and power.

The only way to judge the value of any human artifact is by judging its utility as demonstrated by the evidence of results. But while most secular humanists will readily admit that situational ethics are the only choice for the rational human being, they do not take the next step, addressing in a rational, scientific examination the basic question, the utility of whom?

The philosophical utilitarians always assume that the best behavior must be the behavior that serves the utility of the common good. But there is no empirical evidence that the common good has any value in nature that is greater than, or even equal to, the selfish good. The idea of the common good is another myth, another human artifact. As Richard Dawkins points out in The Selfish Gene, natural evolution is based on individual survival of the fittest, not species survival.

The unresolvable difficulty in choosing between a selfish good and a common good is the question of how one determines what constitutes a common good. Common-good utilitarians tend to ignore this question, and with good reason. In any complicated human cultural situation, it is impossible to determine the common good because so many different conflicts exist between individuals.

Most discussions about common good moral dilemmas revolve around the question of who must sacrifice him or herself for the common good. This is a contradiction in terms. If the common good means the good of all, then it can’t be in the common good if one person must sacrifice an advantage while others benefit from that sacrifice. The lumberman wants logs, the ecologists spotted owl habitat; some want legal abortion financed by public funds, others want to make all abortions illegal; the fundamentalist Christian wants prayer and creationism taught in public schools, the secular humanists science and evolution. These are irreconcilable differences that can not be settled by reason and logic. There is no common ground, no common good, because each side uses a different set of basic assumptions in describing what is good and bad. The only way to finally settle such conflicts is by combat at the ballot box, in the courts, on the streets, or by bargained separation. The end result too often is that the winning side will take advantage of the losing side through force of numbers or strength of arms.

A scientific examination of human behavior demonstrates that human beings always act selfishly, not altruistically. They may claim to act in the common good, but they always describe the common good so that it insures the satisfaction of their own selfish desire.

The same thing also happens when humans claim to be acting in any morally correct manner. Humans have not only developed moral myths, they have developed an uncanny ability of self justification that allows every human to personally convince him or herself that he or she is acting in accordance with their personal moral principles and the common good of all.

Just as the rejection of myth in favor of the scientific method leads to the inevitable conclusion that humans have no special meaning nor purpose, so too must a rational examination of situational ethics lead to the conclusion that the only sound way to judge the value of a given cultural rule is by judging the impact the rule has on one’s own individual survival, happiness, and general contentment.

This is what all people do all the time. No one ever makes any decision regarding relations with anyone else for anything but a selfish reason. Even when someone lays down his life for a friend or an ideology, he or she either initiates the action with the expectation that he will survive to reap the hero’s reward or he does so in expectation of a heavenly reward or a hero’s grave. Give a person enough time to think about it, and he or she won’t do it at all.

Like the recognition of the nihilistic conclusions of existence does not necessarily lead to a state of permanent mental despair, neither does the recognition that all acts are selfish and all claims of selfless behaviour are nothing but self-justifications lead to social breakdown. instead, the recognition of the basic selfish nature of all human beings is the first step toward building more effective and enduring methods of cooperation. Any theory of social organisation which is built on the assumption that people will serve the common good rather than their own selfish interest is doomed to failure. The free enterprise economic system works not only because it is a morally superior system, but because it recognizes the basic selfish nature of human beings.

Human society does work. But it doesn’t work because of religious morality nor because of mythical secular values like altruism, fairness, justice, nor moral excellence. It works only because each individual can best maximise his or her own selfish desires by participating as a member of the society and culture.

Mostly, the driving selfishness that makes society works, occurs on the unconscious level. Our genes make cooperation and socialization a pleasurable activity and loneliness a misery. Our baggage of cultural learning greases the way and makes cooperation and voluntary exchange easy and pleasurable activities.

A rational human who rejects all mythologies, including the popular secular mythologies, can still recognise that it is in his or her own best interest to live and work in a functioning society in which people cooperate with each other, not for the common good, but for mutually identified selfish goals. People who give up faith in all the secular myths don’t have to give up sexual pleasure, family love, the joys of friendship, the economic rewards of cooperative effort, nor any other social pleasure of life. Such a person is seldom disappointed in what other people do, because he or she expects that other people will always act in their own perceived selfish interests.

Because one recognizes that there is no eternal moral imperative that prohibits lying, rape, theft, murder, nor slavery, one is not compelled to commit such acts. Any rational person can very quickly identify empirical evidences that suggest that such acts will not improve one’s long term chances for survival and happiness. Rational people who reject all myths cannot claim to be moral people, but they can claim to be good neighbors.

The human, rational mind has developed into the single most effective survival tool in nature because it allows a human being to overrule both instinct and learning when a changing condition makes any instinct or cultural rule an impediment to personal survival. In the modem, rapidly changing world in which we live, the rational mind becomes a critical tool for survival as we are bombarded by conflicting claims from all sides on how we should live our lives. Myths are the handles which tyrants, politicians, and intellectual ideologues use to manipulate us and enlist us in hopeless social and political causes that feed their egos and purses while stripping us of our personal wealth and happiness, and sometimes our very lives.

All myths eventually fail. The best of the paranormal myths survive because they postpone the promised payoff until after death. The secular myths all promise payoffs in this life. Inevitably we all must discover that justice seldom prevails, that altruism doesn’t always pay back dividends, that life isn’t fair nor can we make it fair, that politicians and government bureaucrats care only for their own selfish interests, that no matter how much we sacrifice for what we call the common good, those who learn to manipulate the common good to their own selfish desires will be the ones who prosper, and that government can not give us an economy that works to the advantage of all.

The myth-free individual has no expectation of such rewards. He or she knows that this is a chaotic world in which we have little control over events, and that our only chance of happiness will result through our use of our intelligence in exercising what control we can over the environment around us so that it serves our own selfish needs.

Whether the process of myth-free living makes one a happier, mentally healthier individual can only be determined by each individual. Most people are so terrified by the reality of existence, they refuse to even consider the possibility that they can live without their myths. Every secular institution from public schools to government bureaucracies do all they can to keep the terror alive because the secular institutions of social control can only survive if people believe the secular myths, just like the churches can only survive if people belief the paranormal myths.

I’ve personally met so few individuals who were consciously trying to live without myths that I can count them on the fingers of one hand. While those few all appear to be dealing better with life than the myth addicts, that’s not enough people to prove the case.

For me there is no choice. I jumped into the brink and found that the rational, scientific, hard-headed, no-nonsense, myth-free living serves me, my wife, and my children much better than all the myths we left behind.

2 Responses to Must We Have Myths To Be Happy? by Mack Tanner

I think the reason narratives are so persistent is a combination of factors – people tend to think in terms of intentions and actors, they simplify complex empirical favorites into heuristics, they’re too lazy or stupid to explain things to children, they are gullible and Intellectually lazy, and because some people benefit from having people buy into a week crafted fairy tale.
I think that myths are unlikely to disappear anytime soon due to these factors but, in modern mass society at least, I do not believe there is any evidence that they’re more useful than dangerous.

Also, the difficulties may myth free pros do have can probably be ascribed to social alienation, being surrounded by gullible morons with self indicted emotional pathologies is hardly comforting. But you’re also less likely to get yourself killed over some retarded reason by becoming a Jihadi, so even there there are trade-offs.

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In this episode, we discuss Slavs, yarmulkes, the Holocaust denier running for Congress, Dave tells his favorite “this district be so black” jokes, I fail to get a joke that even a small child would understand, and Ann discusses her book. A good time was had by none. BUY ANN’S NEW BOOK! https://www.amazon.com/LYFE-Elektras-…

Strange Moments in Cultural History is the class you never took in high school. Grab a seat up front and turn off your brain as we fill your head with tales of oddballs, villains, outcasts, flops and other lesser-known events in this thing we call human existence.

With the recent political changes occurring in Western nations comes a disturbing response that has no face, no restraint and no interest in reason. The rise of so-called anti-fascism — or Antifa, for short — has become the justified excuse for all manner of crimes committed to push an anti-Western agenda, to bolster weak egos, […]

Strange Moments in Cultural History is the class you never took in high school. Grab a seat up front and turn off your brain as we fill your head with tales of oddballs, villains, outcasts, flops and other lesser-known events in this thing we call human existence.

Tensions rise on the range after wolf kills cow in California for the first time in a century: A wolf has killed a California rancher’s cow for the first time in more than 100 years, raising tensions in the newly reclaimed wolf country in California’s rugged northeastern corner. California now has two packs in the […]

An excellent open access paper is out in Cell which explores the distribution of archaic hominin, and in particular Denisovan, ancestry, Analysis of Human Sequence Data Reveals Two Pulses of Archaic Denisovan Admixture: Anatomically modern humans interbred with Neanderthals and with a related archaic population known as Denisovans. Genomes of several Neander […]

So I read the final version of Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. It’s good. You can finally set aside The History and Geography of Human Genes, though with the rate of change in the field of ancient DNA I wouldn’t be surprised […]

by Thomas R. EddlemLeftist gun-banners have claimed that America's policy of wide gun ownership has led to higher homicide rates. But the data doesn't show this:Methodology: I took Wikipedia's pages on "List of Countries by Intentional Homicide Rates" and "Estimated Number of Guns Per Capita By Country" and cross-referenced […]

by Thomas R. EddlemHow the gun control lobby lies with phony statistics:First, they only count "gun violence." This includes suicide by gun. It doesn't count other means of murder or suicide, such as driving trucks into crowds or suicide by poison or other means. Not including these statistics skews the figures greatly, often by several of the […]

by Thomas R. Eddlem“Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's going to do it? You? … I have neither the time, nor the inclination, to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rath […]

The Search for “Chicago’s Great Soul” When Chicago was the intellectual and literary heart of America — and incredibly it once was — its nerve center was a rambling old barn in back of 876 1/2 North Dearborn Parkway, or, more specifically, at 18 Tooker Place. You walked down an alley and found, between two […]

A beautiful facsimile made from high resolution scans of an original copy of the 1975 booklet. 17th issue of the egoist journal “Stand Alone”. What is Man’s Destiny? by Laurance Labadie introduction by Mark A. Sullivan 5.5″ x 8.5″, Saddle-stitched Limited to 66 copies. Order: Underworld Amusements “All through history invasion, conquest, subjugation, enslav […]

A Unanimous Conviction. The other day I passed by a large and apparently flourishing rock pile whereon many of my brothers were working with shameless lack of enthusiasm. One of these I recognized as belonging to a highly respectable family. To him I said, “does not your uncle have a most successful establishment at the […]

In February 2018, The Zambian Observer published an article entitled “Witches and Wizards Are Very Important to the Development of Our Economy – Prof[essor] Luo”. According to the article, Nkandu Luo, a professor and Higher Education Minister in Zambia, said that her country ought to utilize “witchcraft technology” to aid the development of the nation. […]

It is said, and accurately, that “people starved under Communism”. What is typically meant by “Communism”, of course, is the ideology of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.), which was founded by Bolshevikrevolutionaries in Russia in 1917 and collapsed in 1991. [Note: sovietmeans “council”, and Bolshevikmeans “majority”]. The ideol […]

Today we have the return of Bruce Lyon, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Bruce’s notes are indented: Point Reyes National Seashore is a lovely area in the coast 30 miles north of San Francisco. I have lived in California for two decades but only recently […]

Well, the weekend is over, though Grania tells me that today, March 19, 2018, is a “bank holiday” in Ireland, marking St. Paddy’s Day. It’s also National Oatmeal Cookie Day, the WORST of all possible cookies. I can’t think of a cookie I’d like to eat less. Over in Poland, everyone’s celebrating Kashubian Unity Day. […]

I want to start the week with a Laura Nyro song, “Blowing Away“, from her 1967 album “More Than a New Discovery”. The Fifth Dimension recorded this two years later, but I like Nyro’s version better. She was born in 1947, so the oldest she could have been when she wrote this song was twenty. […]

I do feel, quite deeply, that America is changing rapidly; a certain old essence is disappearing, even faster than when I was young. In such cases I think of my father, an old-stock American, Vietnam vet, lover of God, Guns, and Glory–basically all your red state stereotypes. While chatting with parents down at the local … Continue reading Further thoughts o […]

Today’s post is on James Frazer’s Totemism and Exogamy, published in 1910. This book came highly recommended, but I found it disappointing–too similar to a variety of works we’ve already reviewed, including some of the works that kicked off Anthroplogy Friday in the first place. Nevertheless, I’ve been hoping to do something on India, which … Continue readin […]

Stephen Hawking was one of the 20th century’s greatest scientists, not only because of his prodigious intellect, but also because he succeeded in the face of one of the most debilitating diseases possible. ALS normally kills people in 3 to 4 years; Hawking survived for decades. So far there is no word on what finally … Continue reading RIP Professor Hawking […]

There are a lot of motivational books about how to get the success you want. Millions of people buy those books every year, but few people end up satisfied with what they have in life. Why? We talk a lot about how to get what we want, but we rarely talk about how to know […]

I felt panic when I got the photo assignment. I was an 18-year-old part-time reporter and photographer with only a couple of months experience. Sports editor Mike Kilgore handed me a piece of paper with an assignment for later that night — and I had no idea how to do what he wanted. The assignment […]

Starting when I was a freshman in college, I worked as a part-time newspaper reporter. As the youngest and most inexperienced person in my newsroom, I was given the assignments nobody else wanted. The job taught me how little I knew about people. I frequently went to a home or office out in the middle […]

In Spring 2019, the UK is meant to leave the EU. Prime Minister Theresa May soldiers on, but many think she can’t get the job done. Former Prime Ministers John Major and Tony Blair gave ruthless speeches again May, and EU’s lead Brexit negotiator accused May of being “vague” and “not credible”. Major–a member of […]

The University and College Union (UCU)–Britain’s trade union for academics–has gone on strike. The strike is about the University Superannuation Scheme (USS)’s decision to switch academics from “defined benefit” pension plans to “defined contribution” plans. As a PhD student at Cambridge I write this piece at home, having skipped a couple events I really wan […]

The University and College Union (UCU)–Britain’s trade union for academics–has gone on strike. The strike is about the University Superannuation Scheme (USS)’s decision to switch academics from “defined benefit” pension plans to “defined contribution” plans. As a PhD student at Cambridge I write this piece at home, having skipped a couple events I really wan […]

In Episode Four, I interview Simon Tam, founder of The Slants and victorious Supreme Court litigant, about his right to repurpose an epithet to fight racism and celebrate the fighters who came before him. A few resources from the episode: U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit opinion The Supreme Court's opinion The Oyez […]

By Marc J. Randazza A Nevada court previously ordered the censorship of autopsy reports stemming from the Las Vegas massacre. (source) Today, the Nevada Supreme Court reversed that decision as an unlawful prior restraint. (Opinion Here.) The lower court's order would have forced members of the press to allow government officials to freely rummage thr […]

Kenneth Eng is on the other side of viral now, where it's hard to see him. 11 years ago, in 2007, it was easy to see him. He achieved a brief burst of viral infamy for writing a column titled "Why I Hate Blacks," inexplicably published by the now-defunct AsianWeek. He had every quality we […]

I haven’t posted in a while, so here’s some of what I’ve been up to. Three articles at Splice Today, in chronological order: “Bannon is Right About Austrian Economics” “Adam Sandler’s New Film Is Weird Evidence of His Republicanism” “Optics and Allies”

Here is a Constellation of Man preview taken from recent drafts, just a bit late for Halloween. It illustrates a technique I mentioned in August: developing the subjects I have in mind by intuitive branching from an arresting cluster of imagery, instead … Continue reading →

Another preview from The Constellation of Man, in Vol. III. —CPB THERE IS A TALE of a shipwrecked man who washed ashore on an island naked and bereft, whom the islanders discovered, and proclaimed king. At first taken aback by his fortune, … Continue reading →

Video journal by underground philosopher Colin Patrick Barth on the art of writing original philosophy (in the Nietzschean tradition), with insights into the creative process of writing a 3-volume work of literature, “The Constellation of Man.” Recorded August 11, 2017. Included … Continue reading →

By Jack Neison As many understand, I am extremely skeptical of what I call “libertarian bumper sticker slogans.” I have criticized the popular internet slogan “taxation is theft” for being too broad and simplistic a statement to cover the preferences of all individuals. Personally, I do not want to be taxed, and so if I … Continue reading "Black Marke […]

By Jack Neison It’s no secret that I have a healthy distaste for authority. Rather than complain about authority, however, I find it far more productive to dissect and deconstruct authority in order to fully understand its effects on my own life. Two questions come to mind immediately: First, why do I dislike authority so … Continue reading "Authorit […]

This is me re-creating my own blog. As time passed, “Firebreathers” had less meaning to me, and considering that this is what the fans of a horrible pop band call themselves, it was probably a cursed title from the very beginning. So, I got fuckin’ rid of it. Sue me, cunt. I’ve also grown quite … Continue reading "What is this?"

I’m a huge gun rights advocate. I’ve been shooting and collecting guns since I was twelve. I got my first AR-15 thirty years ago, at age sixteen. I joined the Marine Corps Reserve at seventeen and became an infantry weapons repairman and marksmanship coach, and later was a tank crewman, cavalry scout and human intelligence […]

[If you haven’t watched Star Wars: The Last Jedi yet, don’t read this.] As it turns out, Star Wars: The Last Jedi wasn’t just a science fiction movie. In reality, it was a lesson about sexism that we men badly needed. Or something. According to those who find a misogynist under every rock, Poe Dameron’s […]

Shortly after Hurricane Harvey hit Houston, French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo published this cover: The caption reads, “God exists! He drowned all the neo-nazis of Texas!” We should all know about Charlie Hebdo. The newspaper has a long history of attacking anyone they deem worthy, usually with crude and offensive cartoons. That wasn’t much of a proble […]

Star Wars: the Force Awakens was a pretty good movie, but Rey might become a Mary Sue. Not because of anything that is wrong with her. Her personality is fine, her actress was fine, but the rules of her own … Continue reading →

It’s annoying when a feminist sees a movie and calls it misogynist because some character said something that her paranoid mind interpreted as her favorite type of oppression. It’s not any cuter coming from the opposite political side. If politics … Continue reading →

There is one scene in the book that many people hate. It makes Dagny look like a cold-blooded killer to them. I was looking forward to reading it and judging Dagny’s actions for myself. John Galt is captured and is … Continue reading →

photo credit: Bigstock A hundred years ago, the sun never set on the British Empire. These days, England’s rulers are blowing out the candles and telling the citizens to enjoy the darkness. Last week brought news of yet another sexual grooming scandal of underage girls perpetrated mostly by Muslims with roots in the Middle East upon poor and lower-class indi […]

photo credit: Bigstock If you oppose globalism in any way, you must be some kind of Nazi. At least that’s the message I’m getting from the slavishly pro-globalist press. It’s long been my suspicion that this extended, cringeworthy, and now years-long display of wantonly reckless public diaper-shitting known as “The Resistance” to Donald Trump—which has tweak […]

photo credit: Bigstock As one of the very few writers whose work resulted in a government-sponsored attempt at censorship, I can say quite confidently that the government is no longer the biggest threat to free expression in America. It’s the corporations. One of my countless gripes about the grotesquely empty public display of sneering moral condescension t […]

Well, it took some time, but I’m finally here. I officially support Donald Trump for the Republican nomination and the Presidency of the United States. I’m told by the MSM that demographically, I shouldn’t. Trump supporters are supposed to be poor and stupid. I am middle class with a post-graduate degree in Political Science. Granted, […]

Put not your trust in princes: In the children of men, in whom there is no salvation. — Ps. 145:3-4 (in the Catholic Douay-Rheims) It’s been a while since I had time to write, and weekends may be the only time I can realistically do so given my two jobs. However I do think it is […]

I’m not quite ready to put a “Trump 2016” sign on my lawn, but I’m getting there. I had planned on supporting Rand Paul, but as I said in my last post, Rand Paul now sucks. He lied about the Ayatollah of Iran’s statement regarding the nuclear deal in a shameless and despicable way, and […]

I shared some satire about gun control last month, but the left’s campaign to exploit the horrible Parkland shooting seems to have instigated a bunch of new material. So let’s have some weekend fun. We’ll start with this humorous image from Reddit‘s libertarian page that actually does a good job of showing that gun control […]

A couple of decades can make a huge difference in the political and economic life of a jurisdiction. Two decades ago, Venezuela had not yet been subjected to the horror of Hugo Chavez and his destructive statism. Three decades ago, the pro-market success story of Estonia was an enslaved part of the totalitarian Soviet Union. […]

I have a special page to highlight honest left wingers, and I’ve acknowledged several who have confessed that gun control is misguided. Jeffrey Goldberg admits gun ownership reduces crime. Justin Cronin explains how he became a left-wing supporter of gun rights. Jamelle Bouie pours cold water on Obama’s gun control agenda. Leah Libresco confesses that gun co […]

The Middle Ages, as that dodgy sage Carl Jung once wrote, “live on… merrily”. That’s no surprise, really. Superstition will always be with us, in new forms—and in old. Crux: ROME – With reported demonic possessions on the rise in Italy, the Vatican is hosting a week-long training to better prepare exorcists for ministry. Catholic […]

Ronald Bailey, writing in Reason: The meme of Frankenstein as a mad scientist who unleashed a disastrously uncontrollable creation on the world has been hijacked by anti-modernity, anti-technology ideologues to push for all manner of bans and restrictions on the development and deployment of new technologies… For decades, the specter of Frankenstein’s monste […]

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry (HT Tyler Cowen) ruminates on the past and present of Catholicism and how it stacks up to the influence of Silicon Valley. In short he claims that it’s, well, falling short in the modern age: A simple glance at the history of the church should show that the current situation is anomalous. As Rodney Stark, […]

Why the Truth Is Stranger than Fiction Last evening, Carol and I were watching the latest episodes of the Hulu TV series The Path. It is an excellent show illustrating, among other things, the dangers of transformative piety, what I … Continue reading →

Last Friday evening, Cecilia, my mother-in-law and pal, and my wonderful wife Carol, and I were sitting around shooting the breeze after watching John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness and the season finale of The Exorcist TV series. Not surprisingly, the … Continue reading →

Has it ever struck you as pathetically absurd when you hear a defense attorney for a convicted fiend seek mitigation for him, arguing that he was made the man-monster he is by terrible childhood abuse? It seems a last-ditch tactic. … Continue reading →

photo credit: BIgstock I found out last week that the Wendy Bell lawsuit, which I covered in November 2016, has been settled. Bell was a popular anchorwoman at ABC affiliate WTAE in Pittsburgh. In early 2016, a black family was massacred in the high-crime, predominantly black Pittsburgh-adjacent borough of Wilkinsburg. On her personal blog, Bell speculated t […]

photo credit: Bigstock I am so sick of David Hogg, the pompadorable Parkland school shooting “survivor” and media-darling gun control activist. And I feel an intense need to publicly say just how sick I am of this kid, because, apparently, criticism of David Hogg has been added to the left’s ever-expanding list of “hate speech.” Seriously, I haven’t seen suc […]

photo credit: Bigstock I hate to say this, because the last thing I ever want to sound like is a writer for Salon, but damn, this “debate” over school shootings is so very…white. I’ve mentioned before, and it bears repeating at the moment, that as a child I attended majority black L.A. public schools. Well, “majority black” is an accurate label for my junior […]

The Clinton campaign was so overconfident they would win the election, they planned to launch fireworks over the Hudson River on election night. When they cancelled the fireworks the weekend before the election, a lot of people suspected their internal polling showed they were in trouble.Then, after the election, the media naturally looked for incidents of T […]

Hillary Clinton once defended an accused rapist when she was a public defender. Clinton eventually had him plead to a lesser offense. See here.Throughout this campaign, pro-Trump supporters have been saying that the accused was, in fact, a rapist, that Clinton knew he was a rapist, and that Clinton laughed about the "rapist's" twelve-year-old […]

It was discovered in March 2015 that during her tenure as U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton exclusively used a private email server for official communications, thus comprising United States security. To insure that no one could see what she was up to, Clinton deleted thousands of emails with a software program called “BleachBit," and an aide to […]

Immigration sense from Ben Sixsmith: But what of proposed merits of open borders? A consistent failure of the Economist’s article is a reluctance to distinguish between different migrants. If one finds the study, it turns out that 54% of the men and women who expressed a desire to migrate came from Africa and the Middle […]

Everywhere signs of a Great Ending: Gramsci marched right through the institutions and clear off the cliff on the other side with the buildings tumbling after him. The established secular church of the Western left has fallen; it is now just another religion, like Christianity, Buddhism or Islam. Its special status as the high priesthood […]

The charge of scientism is both unreflectively made and unreflectively dismissed; wielded by cranks and bores and brushed off by the smug and the superficial. Given this, its meaning, and its significance, is unclear. Some believe, indeed, that it has … Continue reading →

The English poet Philip Larkin died thirty-two years ago but was perhaps England’s last truly popular poet. It is not surprising that he is remembered. His poems are accessible, in style and in theme, compared to his modern successors. They … Continue reading →

A new year is a time for reflection; a time to think about the past, and the present, and the future; a time to cherish what is good and assess what is bad; a time to think about what can … Continue reading →

Jacob Levy recently wrote an essay airing his teary-eyed dismay that so many of his libertarian friends are cheering on Britain’s bow down from EU membership. This comes to no surprise, since BHL seems to be bent on presenting us with the “libertarian case” for anything from a swollen welfare apparatus to mandatory sex-reassignment surgery. … Continue readin […]

“But, isn’t private property a monopoly on the legitimate use of force” whinges the socialist, “since, after all, the proprietor is allowed to keep people off his land?”. Let’s figure out what a monopoly on the legitimate use of force actually means, first. Everyone who’s brought up the Weberian definition of the state in conversation has inevitably … Contin […]

Disclaimer: If we’ve been away for almost two months, it’s because our dear leader, Comrade Dylan, was grounded for shooting up some church in South Carolina, during which period he couldn’t hang out with his friends or go on the Internet. It’s been about 20 or so years since books like The Sovereign Individual … Continue reading Guerilla Capitalism in Ca […]

One of my dear Progressive friends gave me a book by David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas, called The Bone Clocks. I finished it a couple months ago. It’s Mitchell’s most recent work, and I haven’t read anything else by him to which I could compare it. Despite Mitchell’s ability to balance a quick-moving plot with fanciful prose, prose that measures higher […]

Secrets of the Seven Smallest States of Europe: Andorra, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, San Marino and Vatican City is a fact-filled book about the histories, cultures, economies, languages, and more, of these European microstates. The book also contains information for prospective travellers to the microstates of Europe. While the book is almost […]

[G]overnment interference in university education was not the outcome of a public outcry that university provision was of poor quality, but an act of control and subsequently of protectionism. In the collection of writings making up the book The University Outside State Control, Professor John Kersey makes the historical point that Government intervention in […]

The British election is a success for the strategy that Theresa May pursued: winning over middle aged and elderly working class voters in the post-industrial north. According to a Yougov survey released on Tuesday, she increased the Tory share of voters with a GCSE or less from 38% in 2015 to 55%. In a very … Continue reading Sporadic thoughts on British Gen […]

It is perhaps no coincidence that Stoner rhymes with loner. John Williams’s eponymous novel is an exquisite distillation of what it means to be alone. Not primarily a physical loneliness, an absence of intimacy, but a spiritual loneliness: the sense that no one in the world truly understands you. But more than that it is … Continue reading Review of “Stoner” […]

To anyone sufficiently familiar with the politics of the contemporary student left, attempts to censor speakers for the alleged crime of bigotry should not come as a surprise. Neither should the endorsement of Islamists and their list of grievances. Nevertheless, the endorsement by young progressives of a society that promotes regressive speakers in the serv […]

This is the bi-weekly visible open thread (there are also hidden open threads twice a week you can reach through the Open Thread tab on the top of the page). Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. You … Continue reading →

A few months ago, I wrote Toward A Predictive Theory Of Depression, which used the predictive coding model of brain function to speculate about mood disorders and emotions. Emotions might be a tendency toward unusually high (or low) precision of … Continue reading →

I’ve been trying to delve deeper into predictive processing theories of the brain, and I keep coming across Karl Friston’s work on “free energy”. At first I felt bad for not understanding this. Then I realized I wasn’t alone. There’s … Continue reading →

This essay was the main part of my Observer column this week. (The column included also a shorter piece on barring racists from Britain.) It was published in the Observer, 18 March 2018, under the headline ‘Let’s not give up on the idea that a good education is a search for truth‘. Sam Gyimah is very taken by Moneysupermarket.com. Seven years ago, the newly […]

The latest (somewhat random) collection of recent essays and stories from around the web that have caught my eye and are worth plucking out to be re-read. . A brief history of Stephen Hawking: A legacy of paradox Stuart Clark, New Scientist, 14 March 2018 ‘I think most physicists would agree that Hawking’s greatest contribution is the prediction that black h […]

This essay was the main part of my Observer column this week. (The column included also a shorter piece on sports and ethics.) It was published in the Observer, 11 March 2018, under the headline ‘Aping populist attacks on migrants is not a winning strategy for the left’. On Christmas Eve 1980, Paul Mercieca, the communist mayor of Vitry, near Paris, led a ga […]

by Mr. Mean-Spirited I want you to be miserable. I want you to suffer. I want your life to be ruined. You deserve it. You deserve to be in pain. Every year that I have been alive, society has wronged me. Every day upon this earth, other people have caused me harm. It is only right and proper that others experience some of that hurt. Making other peopl […]

by Mr. Mean-SpiritedThe gamma male is usually depicted as some smarmy bastard who uses people to his own ends. And I am thinking: this is supposed to be a bad thing, right? The more conventional members of society tend to depict the gamma male as somebody who just won’t play the game. And I’m reflecting: damn, this all sounds pretty good to me. The gamma […]

by Mr. Mean-Spirited We’ve all seen Hollywood producers trying to defend themselves against claims of raping starlets. We’ve all heard of politicians trying to explain away multiple accusations of molesting interns. We’ve all watched news anchors trying to excuse their perverted exploitation of freshly-hired reporters. There sheer number of such claims mi […]

What, exactly, is a smug liberal? There’s been a lot of discussion, and even the beginnings of some reflection, on what this term means, and I personally think Vox writer Emmett Rensin nails it: smug liberals think half the country is gullible and dumb. The trouble is that stupid hicks don’t know what’s good for […]

International Women’s Day has come and gone once again with lots of press coverage that iterates some version of the idea that if you invest in women and girls, especially in their education, you produce an economic advantage that accrues to the whole society. I’ve been recasting my life lately into a state of nature, […]

As a Knight Fellow at Stanford, I was asked a lot to speak about how I made my website, Zambia Online, become so successful, and how some of my client web sites, like The (Zambian) Post website, grew so phenomenally. In principle, it is actually very easy. There are two aspects to this: the creative…

My Amazon kindle book, Barack Obama Vs Ayn Rand has reached a small milestone of receiving 30 comments from readers, the vast majority of them very positive and encouraging. I wrote the book as an imaginary debate after immersing myself in the writings and speeches of the two intellectuals: Obama and Rand. President Obama has…

Much progress is being made in genetic research that could soon show which populations have higher genes (alleles) for intelligence compared to others. Many people are excited about this, especially those in the hereditarian world who are fully convinced that their theories about racial differences will be finally confirmed. I predict that there will be…

4Racism.org shows that the fear of being called "racist" is very deadly and harmful. Anti-Racism, like the war against "racist" cops, causes thousands of deaths. So the excess American death toll in 2015 and 2016 from Obama’s war on cops was a little larger than the 4,424 combat fatalities from Bush’s war in Iraq. … Continue reading […]

I was contacted by a reporter for Huffington Post a few days ago, and gave her an interview by email. The article is now up, and I'd like to acknowledge that she was fair in her quoting of my comments. I would, however, like to post the entire interview here, since very little of what I told her actually made it to print. Her questions/comments are in b […]

So, Sargon of Akkad posted this to his channel the other day. I agree with a lot of his arguments. Yes, if alt right people want to wail about white genocide, maybe they should start having babies. That would be a start, no? On the other hand, I do have some concerns I'd love to hear Sargon's opinions on. I left the following as a comment on his vi […]

The book explains, bottom-up from biology why: * Domestic violence is mostly, indeed overwhelmingly female-perpetrated – the hormonal basis of female preference for violence in a couple context, and brain circuitry re male 'backing off' have been uncovered. *Women owe men after marriage break up, not the other way round – pair-bonding being nothing […]

Open borders means admitting immigrants who are rich and poor, persecuted and privileged, educated and uneducated, skilled and unskilled, from all countries. It means the opportunity for all people (with very few exceptions) to live in the country of their choice. Nevertheless, I often write about how open borders would help groups that are extraordinarily … […]

American immigration restrictions inflict immense suffering on immigrants and would-be immigrants. Thousands have died attempting to enter the U.S. through the desert, and others have perished attempting to make sea journeys. Tens of thousands languish each year in detention centers. Others are abused by government agents or criminals. Many are deported from […]

We have reached a time in history where helicopter parenting is no longer an adequate description for an over-involved approach. Parents are not only watchful over their kids…they hover over their kids. They tend to be upper-middle class. They dress well for the playground. They are overly polite (passive aggressive). Oh, and their children “speak” 2-3 […] […]

Here are 5 basic things (throughout your child’s life) that you can do to ensure you grow to hate them. Since some contradict each other in parenting style, I suggest picking 2 complimentary suggestions and focusing your efforts. 1. Make your baby a light sleeper. As you put your infant down for their nap, […]

East side mural, lighter I snapped this pic last weekend in East LA. I had a really great time reading at David Rocklin's amazing Roar Shack series at 826LA. I also had a wonderful meal beforehand at Triniti with a girlfriend.

🐍 There's a house in the San Fernando Valley that's not far from where I live, and the owner has filled the foliage growing in the section of dirt between the sidewalk and the curb with a collection of curious things. There are inspirational signs, small gnomes, a happy Buddha. I don't know who owns the house or what the purpose of this collec […]

Time to make myself unpopular with some people… Following the awful events in Manchester on Monday evening emotions are, understandably, running high. Sadly the same cannot be said for thought processes – although this hardly uncommon even when 22 men, women and children haven’t been brutally slain by a religious fanatic. Ignoring the usual twaddle […] […]

Over at City Metric, John Elledge is telling London commuters to stop worrying and learn to love today’s tube strike and the unions involved in it. Whilst he correctly notes that it’s not just the drivers who have withdrawn their labour, he has this paean to why what is a mostly dull (but occasionally very […]

Judas sold out for the sum of 30 pieces of silver. Two millennia later it would appear that the former director of Liberty, Shami Chakrabarti, has decided that her price is a peerage and a position in the shadow cabinet. Is that, adjusted for inflation, more or less than Judas got?

Newton was an alchemist. Napier a numerologist. Kepler an astrologer. And Giordano Bruno — Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s poster child martyr for scientists persecuted by irrationally superstitious and corrupt institutions — was an occultist. The esoteric, the obscure, the fringe, the poetic, and the spiritual permeate the human intellectual landscape, both in the hu […]

huesoflife asked you: Hi I happened upon your tumblr because you liked one of my posts. Your posts are very intellectually stimulating so that makes me wonder, what are some of your favorite books? Also, I noticed that you have a myriad of interests, what major did you pursue in college, if you don’t mind me […]

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election http://money.cnn.com/2017/10/03/technology/business/yahoo-breach-3-billion-accounts/index.html http://fortune.com/2015/10/05/linkedin-class-action/ https://www.theverge.com/2012/4/25/2973849/google-drive-terms-privacy-data-skydrive-dropbox-icloud while all the lib […]

hahahaha, I can’t even make this shit up… if I was writing fake trollbait articles to make these dudes look bad, I couldn’t even come up with shit half as devious as what these fucks do IRL: https://anaannblog.wordpress.com/2018/03/14/white-trash-alert-matt-heimbach-arrested/ And according to Clarence in Baltimore/GL Piggy/Fire Power/Steve Sailer and their p […]

Brandon Adamson blogs at AltLeft.com – “The Left of the AltRight” Topics: How the Alt-Right is imploding and splitting into factions The incident with Matthew Heimbach and the disbanding of the Trad Workers Party The never ending hypocrisy of preachy Traditionalists The implausibility of success for […] The post Robert Stark talks to Bran […]

Keith Preston is the editor of Attack the System Topics: FBI Paid Best Buy’s Geek Squad to Spy on Customer Devices who are Passing over User Data Violations of the 4th Amendment which prohibits warrant-less searches based on no probably cause Farming out state repression to the private sector as a way to get […] The post Robert Stark talks to Kei […]

Robert Stark and co-host Brandon Adamson talk to returning guest ASHLEY MESSINGER. Ashley is based in the UK and writes for Brandon’s AltLeft.com. You can also find Ashley on Twitter. Topics: A continuation on the topic of a “Redpilled” SWPL culture and it’s viability The implicit Whiteness of progressive […] The post Robert Stark talks to […]

Whilst the EU ramps up internet censorship, particularly people's criticism of its policies, the Council of Europe calls for internet censorship to be transparent and limited to the minimum necessary by law

Agnostic has a post up in which he uses the GSS to look into some stats on gun-ownership, which inspired me to do the same to investigate some questions he might be interested in. The variables are OWNGUN and MARRIED, with SEX as the control variable.First just men: Statistics for SEX = 1(MALE) Cells contain: […]

There’s an unfinished draft of a post I last updated in 2010 intended to be a review of Karl Polanyi’s “The Great Transformation”. Reading Mark Koyama today made it concrete that I’m certainly never going to bother converting the notes I wrote into something coherent or checking the book out again to revisit anything, since […]

I don’t normally review fiction on this blog, but Starship Troopers is enough of a “novel of ideas” that this seemed the best venue to discuss it. Set aside all the scifi trappings, and the core of the book can be found in a later speech he gave which is sometimes reprinted under the title […]